by P. K. Lentz
“Yeah, yeah, I know. But talk about bad timing. What are the chances we’d end up here when a war breaks out?”
“Someone had to be. Might as well be us. It’ll be a story to tell. Anyway, we’ve got nothing to hide.”
Gareth scoffed. “I could do without any more stories.” He unbuckled his seat restraint and launched toward the exit.
“You’re going to leave the bridge abandoned again?”
“Doesn’t look abandoned to me.”
Scowling, Aprile offered some choice comments on her captain’s fitness to command.
Gareth paused at the hatch and twisted to face her. “I have to welcome our last passengers aboard before they go into hibe,” he said. “I’ll be back soon and you can take some downtime. Promise.”
“Whatever!” Before settling into her station Aprile fished an object from her jacket and flung it at Gareth. “There’s your comm disc.”
Gareth plucked it from the air as it sailed past. “Who delivered it?”
“Some girl. Big tits, freckles. Think I saw you with her a few times, but fuck if I can remember her name.”
Smiling and thanking her, Gareth secured the disc in his pocket and left on a heading for the medsuite, where the late-arriving passengers Aprile had brought aboard would be prepped for hibe. About halfway there his comm chimed. It was Ilias, Lady’s engineer.
“Captain,” Ilias began hesitantly. “Ah, you know those three hibe capsules that were just delivered? Well, one of them...” He hesitated, clearing his throat before spitting out the rest of his thought. “One of them is not empty.”
Gareth halted ungracefully on a grab hoop. “What do you mean ‘not empty’?”
“Maybe you’d better just get down here.”
***
CHAPTER THREE
INTERIM: FOUNDATION AND PURPOSE
[From Commonwealth primary school text, Civilizing the Stars: The Crossing and Beyond.]
Two millennia after the great Crossing, humankind took its first step into a bold new era. The advent of the translight drive (‘Drive’) and void engine in I.-00053 suddenly made the universe a smaller place. With the Drive, humanity’s age-old dream of instantaneous translation became real, while the void engine all but eliminated the need for fuel by harvesting energy from the fabric of space itself. Human civilizations once separated by vast gulfs of time and space now stood to become virtual neighbors.
At first glance, the potential seemed to exist for a new golden era of unity and prosperity. But careful examination of our species’ tortured history painted a far darker picture indeed. Wisely, the makers of the Drive opted to pause and consider the implications of their discovery before sharing it with humanity at large. Thus began the great Survey, the meticulous cataloging and assessment of inhabited systems heretofore visited only by those few willing to undertake long and dangerous sublight voyages in hibernation.
A Fleet outfitted with the new Drives set out from the makers’ homeworld of Reissa bearing an army of scientists and intellectuals to worlds known and unknown. The yield of knowledge from that fifty-year Survey was as unparalleled as its implications were grim. Precious few worlds, it seemed, had fared as well as Reissa. A handful had flourished, but most walked a tightrope of annihilation. Nearly all had undergone global catastrophes of their own making. What might be the result if such disparate and unstable civilizations were to come instantaneously within arm’s reach of each other? The answer, of course, could not be known with certainty, but there grew a consensus among the Survey’s architects that the resulting clash of cultures would mean dire consequences for the future of our species.
The risk of unleashing the Drive on humanity was deemed unacceptable. But the Survey’s architects devised a means by which they might safely usher mankind into its new age: the Interim. A legion of sociologists and historians, anthropologists and philosophers, adventurers and administrators, these sole keepers and users of translight would undertake the enormous task of uniting the scattered outposts of humanity into a peaceful, star-spanning Commonwealth.
Based on the Survey results, a handful of worlds were offered immediate membership in the union, with others granted provisional status. The remainder would be continually monitored, even aided, as they struggled toward the elusive stability that few had achieved. Only Commonwealth worlds would be permitted to colonize other stars, lest the Interim’s mission become an endless one. Although the citizens of Commonwealth worlds would enjoy the benefits of translight travel, the technology itself would remain under the strict and exclusive control of the new Fleet. One day, they hoped, Fleet might surrender its monopoly to a united and stable human family that could be trusted to wield such awesome power responsibly.
Today, almost three hundred Reissan standard years from its Founding, the Commonwealth comprises thirteen member worlds and twenty-one provisional partners. With over six hundred catalogued systems presently comprising human space, the time of the Interim is still far from over. But when at last its end does come, it will surely represent mankind’s finest hour.
[END]
***
In a maintenance bay attached to one of Lady’s four passenger holds, Gareth beheld an unconscious female who should not have been there. Wearing civilian clothes common to most of Merada, she slumbered peacefully with her head slumped on one wall of her recently opened hibe capsule. She had olive skin, fine features and black hair that in Merada’s gravity would have fallen to her shoulders. Assuming she’d undergone decent gene surgery at birth, her physical age was somewhere between ninety and one-twenty, a little younger than Gareth.
She was attractive, and Gareth’s first instinct was that he had associated with her--in one capacity or another--on Merada. He racked his brain but came up blank.
“It’s pretty clever how they hid her,” the engineer Ilias explained. “If they’d tried to get her aboard in real hibernation, the unit would’ve registered as active. Instead she’s sedated and breathing from a stored oxygen supply. The viewport in the lid showed a false image of an empty capsule, and the casing is cloaked to scan as empty. It worked, too. She came as a total surprise when I opened the thing. Who do you think she is? Stowaway?”
When an explanation failed to suddenly dawn upon him, Gareth mused aloud, “A stowaway would have to be pretty stupid to do this. If you hadn’t found her, that thing would’ve been her coffin.”
The engineer scratched his neatly-trimmed blond beard. “Whoever rigged this wasn’t stupid,” he said. “Or poor.”
“Guess we’ll just have to ask her. Get Thorien down here to--”
Gareth had been about to say ‘revive her,’ but at that moment he recalled the disc in his pocket. Unexplained woman, unexplained comm disc--maybe it was coincidence. Maybe not.
“Let’s wait on that,” Gareth said instead. “I should check something out first.”
“What should I do with her?”
“She’ll keep.”
With that Gareth excused himself from the maintenance bay and made for a small comm station a few chambers away. He slipped the small disc into its port. The screen lit with a message.
>>FACIAL IDENT COMPLETE. DECRYPT WITH THUMB SCAN.
For his eyes only. So the disc’s sender had gone to some trouble--not unlike their stowaway, Gareth couldn’t help but notice. More alarming still was the knowledge that the disc’s sender must have scanned his face and prints on Merada. The woman Aprile had described would have had ample opportunity to do so, but why?
Not for a love letter, that was sure.
Indeed, it wasn’t a love letter. The image that presently appeared onscreen showed a darkened room, a lone figure seated in shadow. When the figure spoke, its deep voice was deep and heavily distorted.
“Captain Gareth,” the phantom said. “Let me begin by apologizing for the position in which I am about to place you. But we are desperate and faced with little time and few choices. I represent a movement on Merada opposed to the tyranny of the In
terim. Friends and enemies know me as Astynax.
“If you’ll forgive the lack of subtlety, the visual on this recording will now show you some footage recorded on Merada in recent days, along with images from other worlds and other times that begin to illustrate the naked brutality of the Interim.”
The view before Gareth faded to black and reopened on a grainy image of bloodstained walls. The camera panned floorward to hover on the wide-eyed corpse of a man with a cavernous opening where his chest had been. Then it tracked slowly across the floor, showing more corpses similarly dismembered.
While these grisly images played on, each successive scene bloodier the last, Astynax resumed in voiceover.
“As you surely know,” he said, “Merada is now the victim of an Interim assault, some of the results of which you see here. The purpose of their criminal actions, besides spreading terror among those who dare to resist them, is the search for one woman.
“Her name is Dr. Jilan Zerouali, and she has been hiding here for some years under my protection. Now it would seem the hounds have regained her scent. Judging by the ruthless efficiency with which the Interim’s death squads are liquidating our underground, soon nowhere on Merada will be safe for her. Some among us urged Zerouali to enter hibernation in the deepest cave we could find, but for better or worse she refused. She insists on passage out-system, and we are obliged to help her find it.
“At this point I must apologize to you again, Captain, for our agents secretly observed you during your stay on Merada. Some even interacted with you for the purpose of assessing your character. After as much deliberation as time permits, we have selected you as the most suitable candidate to approach for this undertaking. I pray that our judgment proves correct.
“I may be dead by the time you receive this. Time is so short, in fact, that we cannot even afford to await your response. Instead we have already begun arrangements to transfer Dr. Zerouali to your vessel. I hope you will see fit to aid her, and I dare to hope even further that you will succeed.
“Naturally you will wonder what one woman could have done to warrant such attention. The honest answer is that I do not know. She refused to say. However, it is my own deep conviction that she has committed nothing that you or I might consider a crime. The Interim wants her imprisoned or dead, which alone is reason enough for me, and for any man or woman of principle, to desire her freedom.”
The parade of well-captioned images depicting the aftermath of Interim raids on Merada and elsewhere ended. Gareth watched and listened in bewildered silence as the view yielded once more to the shadowy speaker.
“I place my faith in you, Captain,” Astynax said, “a man I do not know and never will. I cannot and need not lie to you about the risks involved should accept my plea. But desperation guides our actions now, as often it must when the tide of history bears down with great force upon us. I regret I may never know how the story ends.”
The rebel leader shifted forward in his chair, and as he did a silver cross glinted on his chest. “It is tempting now,” he went on, “to offer you platitudes about courage, responsibility, heroism and such, but I fear that this mere ‘groundsider’ would only insult a spacer of your considerable experience. So instead I only implore you to look within yourself. Meet the doctor when she comes aboard. Judge her on her character and act according to your own principles. This is all anyone could ask.
“I thank you for hearing me out, Captain, and dare to thank you in advance for your selfless actions in the name of justice.”
The shrouded figure gave a parting nod, and the image onscreen yielded to flashing letters.
>>DELETING.......DONE.
The display melted into gibberish, and the console spat out the now-useless disc.
Staring dully into the blank screen, Gareth wondered if maybe he hadn’t completely misunderstood everything he had just seen. It certainly seemed as if a talking shadow had just politely requested that he smuggle a fugitive past Interim inspectors. But that couldn’t be right. That was crazy.
With the evidence erased, Gareth couldn’t even double check. Neither could he just dispose of the disc and pretend he’d never seen it, thanks to a single, nagging detail.
Zerouali was already aboard.
As luck would have it, Gareth knew, making the fugitive’s presence on Lady a fait accompli was the best move this Astynax could have made. For had he not done so, the answer from her chosen savior would have been a regrettable but emphatic no.
With Zerouali here, however, the decision was as good as made. She would not be surrendered. Not easily anyway. Although Astynax could hardly have known it from his brief surveillance on Merada, he had chosen very well indeed. Lady’s captain and crew would never, ever knowingly aid the Interim.
As Gareth pushed away from the comm station, he took with him an ominous feeling that for the second time in his life, all hell was about to break loose on account of an unexpected female presence on his ship.
***
CHAPTER FOUR
From the surface of Merada, Erick Fyat guided the small escape flyer through the atmosphere and approached the planet’s orbital spaceport. He didn’t dock there, though; instead he used the massive structure as cover and locked the controls. The craft in which he and Coleridge had fled Merada, while outwardly civilian in origin, did have some distinctly military features. For instance, with stealth measures engaged it was all but invisible to any other vessel in orbit, with the notable exception of Whisper of Death and its web of tiny spysats.
Deserting the Social Engineering Service had left the two agents with a choice: remain on Merada and wait for Fleet operations there to end, or attempt to leave the system forthwith. Since Coleridge, in her current state, was all but useless Fyat had made the decision himself to take the latter, bolder course. Hiding in basements or living a quiet life undercover in some rural backwater held scant appeal for him. He’d left the Service, but he wasn’t dead.
Getting out-system, however, would be no easy task. The spaceport wasn’t an option. Even if he could somehow explain away Coleridge’s massive injuries to Meradi authorities there, any use of their SES-provided aliases would send up flags in Whisper’s Intelligence section. Instead he and Coleridge would have to board one of the docked vessels directly.
Ships at port handled their own internal security, something about which commercial spacers were famously lax. Even if they did take adequate measures, they were not likely to stand up to SES infiltration. All he and Coleridge had to do, then, was to sneak aboard a suitable outgoing vessel, evade the eventual Fleet inspection, and ride the ship safely away.
No more Interim service meant no more translight, which meant, of course, long voyages in or out of hibernation. But such was the price of ‘freedom.’ For Coleridge, the freedom to leave the killing behind. For Fyat, the freedom to seek another, more achievable cause in which to kill.
Studying the spaceport schedules from the flyer’s datastores, Fyat quickly chose his target. Lady of Chaos was a moderately-sized vessel with a crew of just fourteen. That high space-to-crew ratio meant lots of hiding places and few seekers. Better, it was third in line for departure clearance, not first which would have been too obvious.
With the flyer’s controls programmed, Fyat went about collecting equipment from its stores that might prove useful. At the top of that list were devices that would help him to subvert Lady’s systems and gain complete access to the ship and its provisions. Then medical supplies to treat Coleridge. And plenty of weapons, of course--just in case.
Securing these things in a small case, he helped the one-armed Coleridge into her v-suit.
“How do I know you’re not taking me back to Fleet?” she asked as Fyat fastened the suit’s loose arm behind her.
“You don’t,” he said.
Coleridge frowned, but didn’t ask again. Just prior to sealing her helmet Fyat jabbed her neck with a sedative. A word of protest died on the woman’s lips as she sank into a deep sleep that wo
uld last several hours.
Fyat could have warned her, of course, but deemed it unnecessary given that her opinion was not needed. With only one functional arm, she was best treated as cargo.
Once his own v-suit was sealed, Fyat improvised a harness out of seat restraints and fastened his inert comrade’s form to his back, along with his case of equipment. Then he maneuvered into the flyer’s small airlock and started the exit sequence.
Decompression complete, the airlock door hissed open on the massive, skeletal arm of Merada’s spaceport. Dozens of vessels of all shapes and sizes clung to the thin structure like tiny leaves on a branch. Fyat’s visor sensors picked out Lady of Chaos among that array of ships, and neurilace-guided arms and legs cast him into open space. Moments later, the flyer he’d just abandoned fired its thrusters on course for the system’s asteroid belt, where it would silently detonate.
Half an hour into his unpowered flight through void, Lady of Chaos loomed ahead. With the enhanced optics in his visor Fyat selected an airlock on the unsuspecting freighter’s hull. He raised his right arm. On it was mounted the device upon which their lives depended: a recoilless launcher loaded with a tiny magnetic harpoon and two kilometers of ultrathin fibresteel filament.
He fired. After several seconds’ delay the harpoon struck the ship’s hull in just the right place and the filament began to retract, pulling the pair of SES deserters on a wide, gentle arc toward Lady of Chaos.
***
Some time after viewing the fateful comm disc from Astynax, Gareth sat drumming his fingers on a table in Lady’s hab module medlounge and waiting for his uninvited guest to awaken.
He had taken pains to ensure he was alone with her when she regained consciousness. No one else among the crew yet knew who or what she was--and they wouldn’t, Gareth had decided, until after he’d spoken with her one-on-one. So, feigning ignorance of the woman’s identity, he had offered Lady’s engineer a flimsy argument that the woman should be awakened in the simulated gravity of the hab module. She was clearly a groundsider, of course, on account of her long hair, and it wouldn’t do to have her wake in a fit of retching. And so he’d brought her here, alone, to the hab module medlounge, where she could come around with a solid bed underneath her.
